


The Shattering of Stone

by Elizabeth Culmer (edenfalling)



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Gods & Goddesses, Awkward Conversations, Background Poly, Depression, Gen, Hopeful Ending, Implied Relationships, Meet-Cute, Multi, Past Relationship(s), Prompt Fic, actually not technically gods but that's close enough for government work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-30
Updated: 2015-12-30
Packaged: 2018-05-10 07:45:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,126
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5577178
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/edenfalling/pseuds/Elizabeth%20Culmer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Matt opened a rift to the middle world to get relief from his own dark realm and the futility of arguing with Vanessa and Wilson over the injustices created by their settlement after the war. He expected a quiet morning alone. What he found was better.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Shattering of Stone

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was written in response to a prompt on the [Daredevil kinkmeme](http://daredevilkink.dreamwidth.org): _[Matt is Hades; Foggy AND Karen are Persephone. Matt's life is sad and lonely until two creatures of sunshine and spring flowers catch his attention. Threesome in the underworld!!!](https://daredevilkink.dreamwidth.org/1296.html?thread=2421776#cmt2421776)_
> 
> I didn't get to the Matt/Foggy/Karen threesome part, alas, and a bunch of strongly implied past Matt/Vanessa/Fisk crept in from somewhere, but I hope it's clear that this meet-cute is aiming toward that scenario. (Also this wants to be the opening chapter of a longer story in which Matt overturns the current setup of the three realms and perhaps fights an incursion by the Devourers while he's at it, but I don't have the time to write that. Sorry!)

Matt opened rifts to the middle world sometimes. Wilson disapproved, but Vanessa ensured that he was technically allowed. Justice dispensed only after mortals died was hardly justice at all, she told Wilson every time he suggested changing the rules, and it would be unwise to divert sentries from watching outward for the Devourers to watching inward for more transient problems. But it would be equally unwise not to remind mortals that they were watching, and that kind of message needed a personal touch. Matt was very practiced at personal touches.

She'd meant those words as a teasing compliment, once upon a time. These days they were a calculated barb. But she was still willing to say them, still willing to take Matt's side on this one point even after the way he ended his relationship with her and Wilson. He could bear much heavier burdens than Vanessa's cold anger in return for this one small slice of freedom.

And if some of Matt's rifts weren't precisely calibrated to swallow and crush mortals sorely in need of retribution, well, he was blind. It was really more surprising that he ever aimed them correctly than that he occasionally missed and found himself standing alone in a mountain meadow, spring sunlight warm on his back and the subtle perfume of a thousand flowers drifting through the air on a tender breeze.

He waved a hand at the rift, sealing away the underworld's dust and stagnant-water scent until he'd drunk his fill of the life he could never truly see.

Matt lay down in the grass, still slightly dew-damp at this hour of morning, and relaxed the choke-hold he kept on his senses down in his own realm. Here there was no stench of despair, no pervasive rust and ruin. In the middle world, Vanessa's world, death was merely the other face of life: flesh and bones reconstituted into soil, then grass, then new bones cloaked in new flesh. A turn in the cycle rather than a sharp jolt sideways into eternal futility.

If Wilson would let dead souls dissolve, or be reborn...

But a rule that applies to one applies to all -- Matt had insisted on that, back when they wrested control of the three worlds from the older powers -- and Wilson would never let his own father break free from his punishment, either through rebirth or through obliteration in a Devourer's jaws. The ranks of the dead would only increase and the underworld only grow darker.

Matt hovered his fingers just barely above the surface of a petal, listened to the drone of bees and felt the faint breeze of their flight brush across his face, and reminded himself yet again that it was for the best he took the role of judge and jury. His realm was bleak, but in Wilson's hands it would be a nightmare.

"Oh!" said a surprised voice from downslope, where the thin soil of the meadow gave way to a scraggly stand of pines.

Matt snapped to his feet and focused his ears and nose on the person -- no, people; one man, one woman -- whose approach he'd missed while mired in his own bitterness and self-pity. Young, he thought, judging by the easy strength and swing of their steps as they climbed toward him. Long hair, brushing past their shoulders and against the linen of their tunics. Bare feet, and yet no other signs of poverty: no sound or scent of hunger, and the dirt on their soles and palms smelled oddly clean and somehow fresh. And over it all, the bright green scent of rising sap and the rainbow sweetness of flowers, much more than the garlands in their hair should justify.

"Karen thought she felt the earth shake and said it might be you," the man continued, "and I said no, it couldn't be, we're not even a century old, there was no way we'd ever be this close to one of the Triune, but here you are! The Lord of the Underworld! Wow."

"Please excuse Foggy, he's easily excited," the woman -- Karen, presumably -- said with a note of fond amusement. "But wow. It's an honor to meet you. Oh, wait, are we disturbing you? I'm so sorry if we're disturbing you. We can come back and strengthen these flowers later if you'd rather be alone." By the end of her speech she sounded nearly as flustered as her companion.

Matt opened his mouth, and discovered that centuries of paring down his social circle had left him unsure how to talk to (rather than threaten) anyone he hadn't known since the great war against the Devourers, when he had been consigned to darkness. He swallowed, and tried again.

"What-- what makes you think I'm him?"

Brilliant. His first words to strangers in generations, and he sounded like an idiot.

But the smile in Karen's voice when she said, "The black clothes and the bandage over your eyes are a bit of a giveaway," sounded welcoming rather than mocking, and Foggy's added, "Also the aura of phenomenal cosmic power," came accompanied by widespread arms, angled toward Matt like an invitation to share their amusement at the unlikely situation.

"Oh," Matt said, and groped until he found another handful of words: "And you're not-- not worried what I might do? I mean, I-- that is-- um--" He held up his scarred hands for lack of a good verbal explanation, and twitched one finger to jolt the earth beneath the two younger immortals' feet.

They rode the tremor with the swaying grace of saplings. Karen even laughed, a quiet sound like the rush of wind through seed-heavy grass.

"You enforce justice," Foggy said when the meadow was still once more and the insects and birds and tiny scuttling creatures resumed their irregular background chorus. "We haven't done anything remotely bad enough to catch your attention."

Karen's heart skipped a beat at his words, suggesting that she at least might not be so innocent, but her posture and voice were calm as she said, "Besides, we're friends with the guardians of this province. Ben and Doris would investigate if we disappeared, and Ben's words are heard and trusted all through the middle world. I doubt you'd want to provoke the Queen by encroaching on her domain, to say nothing of the King's wrath if you ruin the art we create for his wife."

A short burst of air escaped Matt's lungs: a half-strangled laugh, as if his body were trying to remember how to shape itself around the idea of mirth. "No, I don't think anyone wants to upset Vanessa," he said. "That tends to get very messy, and after Wilson finishes making his point, you still have to face her. She's a lot more, uh, creative than he is."

There was an awkward pause. This time Foggy's heart lurched along with Karen's; her breath sped slightly and he began to sweat, just a little, tinged with the acrid scent of fear. 

Implicitly criticizing Vanessa in front of two members of her court -- even minor members who, judging by their own words, had never met her in person -- probably wasn't a good idea, Matt realized.

(It was so much easier to talk to Wilson and Vanessa. Not pleasant, but he could navigate the razor-paved labyrinth of former affection and current ire in his sleep. Even Claire's mix of exasperation and resignation, and her quiet but pointed belief that he could and should find a way to mitigate the inherent cruelty of his realm and its rules, was easier to face than this uncertainty.)

"I'm sorry," Matt said, just as Foggy blurted, "And this is why we know we're safe from you!"

Karen laughed, a little too high and loud, into the renewed silence. "You-- you're really terrible at this, aren't you? Talking to people, I mean."

Matt winced. "I haven't had a lot of practice. Not recently."

Karen hissed on an indrawn breath, as if in sympathetic pain, while Foggy said, "That can't be right. Not in the sense that I think you're lying, because I don't! But in the sense that that's completely wrong and unfair. Don't you have a court down there? Or at least some friends? I bet there are lots of people who'd love to talk with you."

"I have soldiers," Matt said. "It's not really the same." Especially since half of them had been exiled from the overworld for crimes even Wilson couldn't justify in the name of the greater good. Matt sometimes thought the universe would be improved if he fed those immortals to the Devourers as bait. But he never did. He also had limits to what he could justify, and he liked to think his were more stringent than Wilson's.

"You're right. It's not. I'm sorry," Karen said. She turned her head, hair brushing across her shoulders, and presumably held a silent conversation in gestures and glances with Foggy.

"Um," she said when she turned back toward Matt. "We don't want to presume, but... Foggy and I have liked talking to you so far and we wouldn't mind getting to know you better. If you don't mind waiting while we work and send a message so Ben won't think we've been kidnapped, we could come visit the underworld for a little while?"

"Who better to show us around than you?" Foggy added. "And if that works out, we could introduce you to some of our friends here in the middle world. I figure if the Queen and King can visit each other all the time, there's no reason you can't take a little break once a week or so."

They sounded so hopeful and earnest, and even though Matt knew they must be lying -- nobody wanted to visit the underworld, or have him around spreading gloom through the other realms -- he couldn't hear or smell any deceit in their bodies.

And it had been so long since he'd had any true brightness in his life...

"The underworld isn't safe. You have to do exactly what I tell you, at all times," he heard himself say. "But yes. You can visit."

"Great!" Foggy said, and lunged forward to wrap Matt in an embrace. Karen followed swiftly in his wake to rest one hand lightly on Matt's shoulder.

It took every drop of strength he had to clamp down on his reflexive defenses, and stand instead of flee. No one had touched him like that for centuries, simply because they wanted to share joy. Even Claire only bandaged his wounds after Devourer attacks or his own fits of rage when he met with Wilson and Vanessa and had his pleas for change rejected once again. Something around Matt's heart felt like it was cracking, a terrible hot ache like blood rushing back into a limb so long bound and cramped it had nearly withered and died.

He wet his lips and managed to say, "You should get to work."

"Right. The sooner we finish, the sooner we can get going," Karen agreed. She and Foggy stepped back with one last squeeze on his shoulder and around his ribs, and strode briskly into the center of the meadow. They knelt back to back and plunged their hands into the soil, touching the threadlike roots Matt could feel with the fringes of his own power.

And then they began to sing.

Their power was unfamiliar, so different from Matt's own darkness and blood that he almost didn't recognize their strength. And yet, he could only bring death and chaos; his protection was indirect, a removal of dangers rather than a restoration of health and joy. Under the spell of Foggy and Karen's freely shared strength, the flowers and grass of the meadow fairly hummed with new life. Even the animals caught the spillover and basked or bustled as their natures inclined.

Matt let the song and the magic pour through him, let them widen that aching wound around his heart, and wondered if Claire was right, if he should try a new approach instead of hurling himself headfirst into battles he'd known for generations were hopeless. If he could trust others the way he'd once trusted Vanessa and Wilson, and believe that not all love would inevitably end in betrayal and pain. If he could make his realm a place of peace instead of punishment.

He cracked a tiny rift open beneath the meadow, not so large as to reach the surface or to break Karen and Foggy's concentration, but enough to let an echo of their song trickle down into the underworld and touch the countless legions of the dead.

Perhaps this was what seeds felt when they sent a first, slender thread of green up into the light.


End file.
